'The Clouds,' B.C. 423: an attack on Socrates, unfairly taken as an embodiment of the deleterious and unsettling "new learning," both in the form of Sophistical rhetoric and "meteorological" speculation. Worthy Strepsiades, eager to find a new way to pay the debts in which the extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him, seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory of Socrates, that he may learn to make the worse appear the better reason, and so baffle his creditors before a jury. The young man, after much demur and the ludicrous failure of his father, who at first matriculates in his stead, consents. He listens to the pleas of the just and unjust argument in behalf of the old and new education, and becomes himself such a proficient that he demonstrates, in flawless reasoning, that Euripides is a better poet than Aeschylus, and that a boy is justified in beating his father for affirming the contrary. Strepsiades thereupon, cured of his folly, undertakes a subtle investigation into the timbers of the roof of the Reflectory, with a view to smoking out the corrupters of youth. Many of the songs sung by or to the clouds, the patron deities of Socrates's misty lore, are extremely beautiful. Socrates is made to allude to these attacks of comedy by Plato in the 'Apology,' and, on his last day in prison, in the 'Phædo.' In the 'Symposium' or 'Banquet' of Plato, Aristophanes bursts in upon a company of friends with whom Socrates is feasting, and drinks with them till morning; while Socrates forces him and the tragic poet Agathon, both of them very sleepy, to admit that the true dramatic artist will excel in both tragedy and comedy. 'The Wasps,' B.C. 422: a _jeu d'esprit_ turning on the Athenian passion for litigation. Young Bdelucleon (hate-Cleon) can keep his old father Philocleon (love-Cleon) out of the courts only by instituting a private court in his own house. The first culprit, the house-dog, is tried for stealing a Sicilian cheese, and acquitted by Philocleon's mistaking the urn of acquittal for that of condemnation. The old man is inconsolable at the first escape of a victim from his clutches; but finally, renouncing his folly, takes lessons from his exquisite of a son in the manners and deportment of a fine gentleman. He then attends a dinner party, where he betters his instructions with comic exaggeration and returns home in high feather, singing tipsy catches and assaulting the watch on his way. The chorus of Wasps, the visible embodiment of a metaphor found also in Plato's 'Republic,' symbolizes the sting used by the Athenian jurymen to make the rich disgorge a portion of their gathered honey. The 'Plaideurs' of Racine is an imitation of this play; and the _motif_ of the committal of the dog is borrowed by Ben Jonson in the 'Staple of News.'